UN Women’s Contribution to Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE)

Marco SegoneDirector, UN Women Independent Evaluation Office

Formative (forward looking)

Purpose and framework

• Relevance• Effectiveness

• Integration of GE

• Organisational Efficiency

• Lessons Learned

• Global

• Regional

• National

Normative •

Coordination • …...

Operational •.

501 372 Women

129 MenStakeholders consulted

6 Local women trained in participatory video

SURVEYS61 People28 Countries22 Orgs

EVALUATION TEAM

4 Evaluators1 Feminist economist1 Organizational coach1 Participatory video specialist4 Researchers1 Photographer

IEO3 Evaluation management team2 Evaluation specialists

7Months

300 +Documents analyzed

7 co-evaluators from UN Women country offices

and civil society

partners

27 Country portfolio review6 Country visits5 National participatory evaluation workshops

41 Findings

10 Conclusions

5 Recommendations

Evaluation Report

• Well positioned to influence Women Economic Empowerment at the global, regional and country level

• Comparative advantage: policy and normative work

• Potential role to bring gender-responsive empirical evidence into mainstream economic debates

Relevance

Rec. 1: engage with macro-policy

UN Women’s mission is best served by moving decisively in the macroeconomic space

• Normative mandate has enabled UN Women to effectively influence international norms and standards

• Coordination and joint programming have made a cautious but important contribution to advancing Women Economic Empowerment within the UN system, especially at country level

• UN Women’s operational work makes the most effective contribution where it identifies and addresses structural barriers and bottlenecks

• More strategic and selective partnerships for enhanced effectiveness

Effectiveness

Rec 2: Maximize partnership

UN Women should provide clarity on its commitment to leading through partnership

Women’s economic rights stand in a disadvantaged position to the dominant economic paradigm. In this context, UN Women needs to mobilise and give voice to all the allies it can – including men, civil society, and the private sector.

Gender Equality

Rec 3: rights-based approach

UN Women’s work should explicitly be based on and guided by a rights-based approach

Organisational Efficiency

Need to consolidate and strengthen a consistent approach to leadership at all levels within the organisation to enhance contribution to Women Economic Empowerment

Rec 4: leadership

UN Women needs to strengthen leadership across the organization in order to support work on Women Economic Empowerment

Rec 5: knowledge-led organization

• UN Women needs to equip and organize itself in line with becoming a knowledge-led organization

• Systemic approach to integrate the wealth of evidence and multiple knowledge management initiatives

Thank You